Saturday, November 22, 2003

God Bless the USA

Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. - US Constitution, article IV

I'm wondering what the over-under is on the number of times John Ashcroft's head spun around like that chick from The Exorcist when he found out that gay marriage is fixin' to be the law in Massachusetts.

The beautiful thing here is that the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution leaves the intolerant fuckers no outs. If Ashcroft's gay neighbor from Missouri flies to Boston to get married, he's every bit as married in Missouri as in Massachusetts. They can't opt out, and no busllshit "Defense of Marriage Act" will let them (no act of Congress can override the Constitution). Legal gay marriage in one state essentially means legal gay marriage in every state .

I'm guessing I don't want to know the amount of our money the rightwing nutjobs are prepared to spend on overtime pay for their ideological thought police to find a way out of this. But I'm sure hoping they can't. Fat Tony and the Supreme Court may decide to step in, but there will be thousands of gay marriages on the books before they have a chance. Either they'd have to let those stand, or retroactively annul them. Either course would launch a flood of lawsuits.

The really beautiful things here is that no one gives a fuck. We're apparently too busy watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or speculating about how long J-Lo will wait before taking a Zippo to her latest marriage contract to get all worked up over whether or not two guys we don't even know are gonna get hitched. We just don't give a fuck.

God Bless America

I know the wingnuts will be out in force over this, but they'll be alone. We've all got gay friends, coworkers, or relatives. Few of us care what they do on their own time.

I'm happy to see the day where the average guy on the street is far more tolerant than the average politician.

This is still gonna be ugly. There will be lawsuits and more lawsuits. Multiple states will attempt to ignore the aforementioned US Constitution and deny legal rights to married gays. Fortunately, the good guys will win on this one, eventually. If nothing else, it'll come down to the fact that time is on the side of the angels here. My kid's generation really doesn't give a damn what anyone does with their private parts. When they take over, the Orrin Hatches of the world can crawl back into their caves.

Friday, November 21, 2003

Neo-Conservative Fantasists: 0; Reality: 1

An article in the latest New Yorker makes points out how our lack of planning for post-war Iraq has hurt us. We've unnecessarily pissed off Iraqis who may have sided with us; we've wasted the opportunity to immediately begin improving Iraqi lives in small but measurable ways; and we've made ourselves look weak and indecisive. Most of the blame for this can be put to the pointy headed neo-Con hawks who spent the last 2 years selling this war to the American people.

Their best-case scenario was apparently the only one they bothered planning for. The assumption was that all the Iraqis would great us with roses and bottles of Evian, then we'd hand over power to our chosen puppet and fly home on the magic carpet from Alladin while the 700 man Iraqi exile militia and the uninterrupted flow of oil from wells and pipelines miraculously unharmed by years of bombing and economic sanctions would provide for the safety and material well-being of millions of impoverished Iraqis with no history of liberal democracy.

Unfortunately, the monkies flying out of Richard Perle's ass din't do their jobs and this scenario never happened. Instead, we're stuck in a country with effectively no law aside from that enforced by American arms, no money aside from that provided by the American government, and no one to pass power to who is both acceptable to us and to the Iraqis as a whole (Chalabi and the INC ended up about as popular as George Steinbrenner in Fenway Park).

There seem to be two main reasons for our lack of planning:

1) The necessity to sell the War:
If we'd planned realistically for a long-term occupation and reconstruction of Iraq paid for with American money, the hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops needed would have seriously dampened enthusiasm for the invasion. In fact, a legitimate look at how much it would cost and how long it would take would've killed the War before it took place. The overriding need to sell a war with Iraq forced the neo-cons running the Bush administration to lie about what it would really take.

2) Wishful thinking and lack of real world experience:
There seems to be quite a bit of evidence that the Bushies were deluded by their own propaganda and ideological blindness. If you spend all your time telling each other that the only real foreign policy problem is lack of toughness on the part of previous administrations, and that nation building is for pussies, you'll eventually start to believe it. If you combine this with a complete lack of understanding the way the world works outside your comfy thinktank, you get big trouble. Unfortunately, we got big trouble too.

Mission Accomplished

Well, The Bushistas said that they'd make Iraq free of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Since it appears that there haven't been any WMDs in Iraq for over a decade, I guess they can mark that one off their list.

As I'd stated before, I have no doubt that Saddam wanted WMDs. I'm guessing he just thought they weren't worth the trouble they'd get him in if caught. This looks like one place in which the Bush Senior/Clinton era containment policy actually seems to have worked. Maybe those guys who have actually held jobs outside neo-conservative think-tanks know what they're doing after all?

Harold Pinter Can Kiss My Ass

The noted British flatulist recently compared the United States to Nazi Germany. Leaving aside the well-known rule of internet argumentation that whoever invokes the Nazis first automatically loses, it's just such an obvious load of horseshit and an insult to those were had to experience Nazi Germany firsthand.

I'm no fan of the Bush administration, but they're no Nazis. They may be short-sighted idiots with little real world experience, but that makes them more like Harold Pinter and his ilk than like Nazis.

Nor, of course, should you compare the hard-working, decent folks in the US military to the murderous thugs who carried Hitler's banner in battle. From what I've seen, the military has gone to great lengths to accomplish it's mission with as little loss of civilian life as possible. They've been put in a bad situation, and are doing the best they can with it.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Why Isn't Rush in Jail Yet?

If I had illegally purchased thousands of prescription narcotics over the course of months or years and gotten caught, I would be in jail now.

If you had illegally purchased thousands of prescription narcotics over the course of months or years and gotten caught, you would be in jail now.

If awell known liberal like Phil Donahue or Al Franken had illegally purchased thousands of prescription narcotics over the course of months or years and gotten caught, Limbaugh would be calling for him to be in jail now.

The Fat One was certainly hot to lock up drug offenders for nonviolent crimes back before he got caught.

So what's the problem?

Lock the fat man up, and do it now. Treat him exactly like every other poor SOB who routinely gets crushed by the War on Some Drugs Used by Some People.

Just as we didn't get out of Vietnam until the rich and comfortable started seeing their own sons face the draft, we won't end this stupid, unwinnable war until the powerful and their families start getting sent to Leavenworth and Attica for nonviolent drug crimes. It's too late to bust GW Bush for all the blow he snorted back in the 70's, but it's not too late to make another hypocritical fatcat into a poster boy for reforming the drug laws.